


Sea Change

by vintageprayers



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-09 11:19:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1980960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vintageprayers/pseuds/vintageprayers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lost Cause, It’s All In Your Mind, and other songs Darcy needs to stop listening to on repeat if she ever wants to get over Steve and Bucky. Beck has a wide and varied discography, and Sea Change isn’t even in her top three albums, and really, who wants to spend more than a few hours at a time living vicariously through someone else’s breakup?</p><p>The point is, something has to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lost Cause

Darcy decides abruptly that she is done with crying. She tells herself firmly that she is a mature adult with responsibilities and friends and a really great boyfriend who is equally, if not more, fucked up over this, and she needs to shower, put on real pants and deal with her life.

Darcy does not do any of these things. She does, however, roll over and put a pillow over her face so that the universe doesn’t know she’s crying. She’s not really crying anymore so much as hiccuping and making increasingly pathetic noises, but so long as the pillow’s there, no one can see or hear her. She is firmly in denial land and she would like to stay there as long as possible. Longer than is possible, actually. That’s the thing about denial land, she thinks to herself. It’s always there for you, even when your other boyfriend gives himself up to an evil neo-Nazi organization in order to save your sorry butt, and it’s _really_ there for you when he comes back without a clue about who you are and why you occasionally slip and call him stupid pet names. He used to think it was funny. Now? Not so much.

Darcy is actively not remembering how Bucky’s lip curls in disgust when that happens. That entire portion of her brain is now dedicated to watching reruns of Battlestar Galactica and thinking about really cool dogs, like Great Danes who are afraid of everything and that Husky who can talk.

She thinks if she tries hard enough, she might even be able to repress their entire relationship. From day one when he helped her lift a box of Jane’s files and left without a word to somewhere around day three hundred and twenty when he took one look at her in a chokehold with a gun to her head and dropped every one of his weapons and surrendered himself to Hydra. And all the moments in between with Steve there and the three of them smiling and everything seeming so _perfect_ that of course it had to end at some point.

The bright side is that Bucky still knows Steve - still knows that Sam is a friend and that Natasha would kill to protect him and that Tony is an asshole, but an asshole with good tech and the ability to fix his prosthetic no matter what damage he does to it. Bucky still has family, and that’s _good_. She has to remind herself that it’s good a lot, especially when she walks in on Sam and Bucky talking and the guy who used to kiss her senseless (among other things) looks at her like she’s actual human garbage. Or when he smiles at Natasha. That one sucks.

Steve keeps telling her that he’ll come around, but it’s been nearly four weeks and Bucky’s doing the opposite of coming around. Mostly he’s just glaring at her and pretending she doesn’t exist. And Darcy, being an incredibly mature adult, is moping in her room and also pretending she doesn’t exist. She’s gotten really good at it. In fact, she thinks she could probably play a dead person on one of those crime shows. She used to wonder how the actors did it, but after a few days of perfecting lifelessness, she feels ready for it. Bring on the zombie makeup.

She’s practicing a lifeless stare at the ceiling when her phone rings. She tries to move as little as possible (the dead, if they must move, move incredibly slowly) and puts the phone up to her face.

“Yeah?”

“Darce?” Her ringtone for Steve used to be something stupid and patriotic, but it got too depressing to listen to the Battle Hymn of the Republic every time he tried to get her to try just _one more time_ with Bucky. So now it’s the generic iPhone ringtone, which is actually even more depressing.

“Uh huh.”

“Is it okay if I come over?”

Steve is doing his best to completely ruin denial land. To be fair, though, she’s been ruining things too. Like how he and Bucky used to basically live with her and now he calls instead of just showing up. Or how she’s been kind of a bitch to Natasha just because she’s pretty and Bucky shouldn’t smile at pretty girls who aren’t Darcy, even if he doesn’t remember her. It turns out she’s great at dealing with a lot of things (Thor, Jane, Tony and _Thor_ come to mind) but her sort of ex-boyfriend having her existence wiped from his brain isn’t one of them. She’s not even sure if he’s her ex. He’s still with Steve, except Steve’s trying to mediate and keeps telling both of them that he’s not choosing. That part probably has a lot to do with the glaring. She’d be pissed too if some random showed up in her life and fucked with her relationship. Although, some random had showed up and fucked with her relationship, except being pissed at a Hydra agent because Bucky got all Eternal-Sunshine-d and not because the guy put a gun to her head and shoved Bucky into a car so he and the other goons could torture him was the most petty, fucked up thing in the world, and she’s trying really hard not to be an asshole.

“Darcy?” Steve sounds worried, which sucks. It all sucks, but it sucks the most for Steve. Or maybe Bucky. It’s really a toss up about who it sucks more for.

“Yeah, I’m not doing anything. See you in a bit?” She rolls her eyes at herself. _See you in a bit?_ she mouths sarcastically, scrunching her face up.

“Okay, yeah.” He pauses for a second. “I love you. See you soon.” He hangs up after that and Darcy frowns. Stupid perfect boyfriend. He still tells her he loves her whenever they talk, even after everything. If she was a better person she’d tell him to just be with Bucky so that at least they could be happy together. She’s pretty sure no one’s happy right now, and after what he did for her, Bucky should be the one with the happy ending. What kind of a bitch would she have to be to let him give himself up to fucking _Hydra_ for her and then steal Steve from him too? A huge bitch. The biggest bitch.

She considers meeting Steve with unwashed hair, still wearing last night’s pyjamas (pyjamas from the night before that, if she’s honest with herself) but decides that much self-flagellation is beyond her. And besides, the shower does make her feel marginally better, even if she can’t actually wash away boy drama amped up to unreasonable levels. She remembers fighting with her BFF in middle school over a crush on some guy neither of them ended up with. _That_ was a reasonable level of boy drama. This entire situation is definitely not reasonable.

The knock on the door startles her, and she winces when she realizes Steve isn’t going to use his key. He still smiles when she opens the door, but he does that thing where he scratches behind his ear and kind of shrugs at her, and _breaks her heart_ because Steve being awkward around her is like an awful flashback to the time before she knew everything about him.

“Hey,” he says, shifting to shove his hand into his pocket.

“Hey,” she echoes. “You didn’t use your key.”

He shrugs again, smiling apologetically. “I didn’t know if… I didn’t want to just barge in.”

“No, you can - It’s fine.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “Barge away. Is, um. Is everything okay? Is Bucky -” She stops herself before she says something stupid, like _Is Bucky okay_ (no, he’s not, of course he’s not) or _Is Bucky still considering killing me in my sleep_ (yes, probably). “Never mind,” she finishes lamely.

“You can ask about him,” Steve chides softly. “You don’t have to pretend not to care.”

Darcy sighs. “Is he okay?”

“He’s been asking about you.” Steve has this way of looking right into her soul and it’s so very much not compliant with denial land rules. He has hope in his eyes and _there is no room for hope in denial land_. Darcy keeps her eyes on Steve’s shoes. “He wants to know why you’re not around anymore.”

“Well, fuck.” She closes the door behind him and takes a moment to press down anything resembling hope. Darcy’s life is brought to you today by the letter ‘R’ for repression and recurring daydreams about her life circa six months ago and redheads she should really call and apologize to.

“Darcy, you know I understand this better than anyone. You have to give him time. He’ll figure it out.”

She scrunches her face up and fights the urge to cry. “Steve, he doesn’t know me. And he doesn’t _want_ to.”

“Darcy -”

“No seriously, I’m pretty sure he hates me. Have you seen that look in his eyes? He gets this look like I’m a mosquito or something. An irritating mosquito that’s getting between him and the guy he’s loved for like eighty years.”

Steve’s face falls and Darcy immediately feels bad.

“He loves you,” he says seriously. “You know he does. He just doesn’t understand. He doesn’t remember us.”

“He remembers _you_ ,” she reminds him.

“Not how I am with you and him, though. It’s different.”

Darcy sighs. “This is because of me, Steve. He knew what he was doing, what could happen. I can’t be the person getting between you and him when this whole thing is my fault.”

“It’s _not_. You didn’t do this to him.” He’s starting to look pissed, and Darcy really, _really_ gets that. “I would have made the same choice, and if it were me - if I couldn’t remember you, I’d want you to remind me. I wouldn’t give you up just because it was confusing or difficult.”

“Okay, I didn’t pull the lever or whatever, but…” she trails off. “What’s the difference really?” She smiles sadly. “You should be with him. He needs you right now.”

Steve starts to shake his head but Darcy grabs his hand. “Maybe he’ll remember. It could go back - we could go back to the way things were. But until then, this in between stuff isn’t helping anyone. He needs you. More than I do,” she adds, looking anywhere but at Steve.

He brushes his thumb back and forth over her palm. “I can’t not be with you, Darcy.” He sounds unbearably sad and it feels like a punch to her gut. Stupid perfect boyfriend. Stupid feelings.

“Yeah, well. I know I’m amazing, but you’ll have to survive without me.” She fakes a sunny smile and the corner of his lip turns up slightly.

“You are amazing,” he says seriously. “And we’re going to figure this out.”

She nods. “Yeah. But for right now - ” She leans up to kiss his cheek. “Be good to him, okay?”

Steve looks like he wants to argue but he nods. “Can we just - just for today? For a few hours?”

She bites her lip, trying to decide if it would hurt more for him to leave now or later. “Yeah,” she says finally. “Just for today.”

He follows her to the bedroom, toeing his shoes off and folding himself around her. She closes her eyes and imagines that Bucky’s at his back and everything is the way it should be. There aren’t any big gestures or declarations - he just holds her, kissing her hairline and telling her meaningless gossip from the Tower common rooms. When it gets dark, he kisses her one last time, tells her that he’s going to fix things in his best Captain America voice, and then he leaves.

Darcy doesn’t cry, which she thinks is an achievement worthy of more Netflix and ice cream.

**x**

Darcy goes back to work two weeks after Steve came to her apartment. To her credit, Jane doesn’t acknowledge that anything’s different, even if the small part of her brain not dedicated to science is probably burning for details. They settle back into their old routine, and for long hours Darcy is able to lose herself in recording data and translating Jane’s chickenscratch into beautifully styled digital documents of how hard they’ve both worked for the past three years. She consults her CSE style guide, makes new pots of coffee, orders in their lunches and, somehow, inexplicably, manages to forget for hours at a time.

Until her fourth day back, when she looks up and sees him walking past the glass doors, away from the elevator and towards Stark’s lab. It’s only a few seconds, short enough for her to doubt herself (it wouldn’t be the first time her imagination got the best of her) and long enough for her to see the glint of the overhead lights on his arm. She tells herself that he’s probably going to Tony for a tech tune up or something, puts on her headphones and gets back to work.

Except she keeps seeing him. Not every day, or even every other day, but often enough. And then, because she’s a hopeless idiot, she starts watching for him. And then she starts wondering in earnest about what exactly he’s doing in the labs and that leads to worrying about whether or not his arm is seriously malfunctioning and if Tony can’t fix it and that’s why he’s spending so much time there. And then she starts imagining Bucky having to remove the arm entirely and how unfair that would be, and before she knows it she’s in full-blown mother hen mode over the idea of him adjusting to a new prosthetic. Steve does his best, but she knows Bucky hates worrying him, so he wouldn’t tell him if it was bugging him or if the edges chafed or if he was frustrated with the difference in sensation.

She used to be the one to harass him until he finally caved and confessed to having emotions about stuff.

She sends off a quick text to Steve before she can reconsider because, again, hopeless idiot. His response comes in minutes, saying that Bucky’s the same - still frustrated and confused, but okay.

She frowns, wanting more than anything to ask for more details. Another text arrives seconds after.

_I miss you._

And that’s when she puts her back to the doors, turns her phone over, and starts thinking happy science thoughts. Jane is close to a breakthrough, Darcy is going to be acknowledged when she publishes, and she is too busy being _incredibly_ good at her job to think about Bucky spending an unusual amount of time in Tony’s lab and Steve missing her. Even if she misses them both so much that it’s like a constant ache in her chest that she might have attributed to heartburn if she hadn’t already tried popping Tums like they were candy.

She thinks it would be easier if she’d ever had a bad breakup before, but the truth is, Darcy’s never really been dumped. Not in any meaningful way. Which probably has something to do with Darcy never having been in any meaningful relationships until Steve and Bucky and their stupid handsome faces making her do crazy things like agree to turning a night of (really great, beyond amazing) sex into a long term relationship with two WWII-era antiques.

But, things being as they are, Darcy has never had her heart broken before, so now she’s confusing heartache with heartburn and rearranging the lab tables so she won’t be able to watch the halls for her sort of but not really ex-boyfriend.

It’s a suitable bandaid until Bucky starts coming into Jane’s lab instead of just walking past it. Of course he doesn’t talk to her, he just passes along messages to Jane from Tony, or Bruce, or Thor, or anyone else in the building who needs to talk to Jane. Never mind the existence of Jarvis, cell phones, or _email_ , apparently Bucky is the new standard method of communication in Stark Tower. He only stays for a few minutes at a time, but it’s enough for Darcy to start hanging her headphones around her neck at all times so she can (very, very subtly) put them over her ears whenever he comes in and not have to hear him speaking in full sentences to someone else. And Jane, myopic nerd that she is, doesn’t even register Bucky’s visits as abnormal.

If Darcy were a bitter person (which she is not), she’d be more than a little bitter about it.

She barely sees Steve since she stopped hanging out in the common rooms at the tower, and she only sees Bucky during his odd forays into the science floor, which she’s pretty sure are designed to torture her.

All in all, Darcy is not pleased with the current state of affairs. She should be happy that Bucky’s feeling social, that he’s not cooped up in his apartment with Steve and refusing to talk to anyone. And she _is_ , really. The first time he came into the lab, despite everything, she had to hold back a smile at the sight of him approaching Jane. She knew science people made him nervous, and science tech even more so, but she could see him out of the corner of her eye, rolling his shoulders back and striding forward. But mixed in with that surge of pride and happiness for him is this ugly feeling of resentment and envy, and Darcy _hates_ having ugly feelings like that, especially toward people she loves. So she puts her headphones on and stares at the screen of her laptop and tries really hard to forget that he’s even in the room.

**x**

After a long day of pointedly ignoring Jane’s sympathetic glances, she manages to get home (even with the Downtown 6 being delayed by twenty minutes). She opens her apartment door, already kicking off her shoes and pulling her sweater off when she hears a pointed cough coming from her couch.

She barely has time to fumble for her taser before she hears Sam of all people telling her to wait. She turns and sees him rising up from the couch, his hands in the air.

“Hi,” he says to the ceiling.

Darcy sighs. “I’m wearing a shirt. You can stop averting your eyes now.” She drops her bag to the table and rolls her eyes. “Although you wouldn’t have to worry about that if you weren’t creeping in my apartment. Like a _creep_ ,” she says pointedly.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says twice, wincing. He lowers his hands and finally looks at her. “I swear I didn’t used to think breaking in to people’s homes was normal,” he says with a grin, and Darcy wants to kick herself because she’s already forgiven him. Sam’s smiles are lethal. She’s pretty sure if he weren’t totally dedicated to saving the world, he’d have a solid career as a model. Or one of those actors where it doesn’t matter if they’re talented or not because they’re just so damn _pretty_.

“Steve’s corrupted you,” she agrees. “Although the sneaking into apartments thing is more Bucky’s bag.”

“Actually,” he says, “Natasha’s been teaching me lock picking. I’m surprised they let you live in a building with such shitty security. You know one of your neighbors just let me in? No questions asked.”

She rolls her eyes again. “That’s why I like living here. None of my neighbors are overly paranoid super spies. Besides, even if you were a legit creep, you’d still have to get past -” She stops herself before she says Steve and Bucky, but Sam obviously knows what she was going to say if the way his eyes soften is any indication. “So,” she says instead. “You here for the thrill of breaking and entering or…?”

Sam settles back into the couch and gestures for Darcy to join him.

“You don’t have all our friends waiting to ambush me with an intervention, do you?” she asks, half joking and half concerned about whether or not Natasha is hiding behind a curtain somewhere.

“You need intervening on something?”

“Well,” she says, pulling her legs under her in the armchair. “You’ve got this habit of trying to fix people, and normally it’s really endearing, but I’ve had a shitty couple of days. So what’s up?”

Sam frowns. “I don’t want to fix you. I just want to talk. We’re friends, right?”

She winces. “Yeah. We’re friends. Good friends. You’re a really good friend, Sam,” she says sincerely. “Sorry, I’m …” She waves her hand around her head. “I’m all weird. Don’t mind me.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m the one who showed up uninvited. Which I _am_ sorry about. I just wanted to see you and then you were late coming home and I tried calling but it just went to voicemail, so I just… let myself in?” He smiles and shakes his head again. “Again, I used to be more well-adjusted than this. I even brought beer,” he says, brightening up. He moves to get up, gesturing toward the kitchen. “Peace offering?”

“Yes, please.” Sam gets up and she calls after him. “Sorry about the phone thing. I got stuck in the train station.”

He hands her a beer, cold from the fridge, and she takes a long drink before smiling gratefully at him. “You’re a hero, Sam Wilson.”

“Just call me Duffman.” He settles back into his spot on the couch and drinks from his own bottle.

They sit quietly for long minutes, drinking and saying nothing, until Sam breaks the silence.

“So, we gonna talk about this?”

Darcy closes her eyes, scrunching up her face and sighing. “Do we have to?”

Sam sighs. “Maybe? You guys are screwing it up. It’s getting hard to watch.”

“You should try Netflix instead. Or HBO. You know Tony subscribes to literally every streaming platform there is?” He gives her a pointed look and she huffs. “I’m just saying,” she insists.

“Look. You don’t want to talk about it, then we don’t have to. I’m just saying you three are making yourselves miserable. You should stop that.”

“I can’t really force him to remember me,” she says with a frown. “It’s not like I can hit him over the head and reboot his brain.” She’s considered it, especially after talking to Nat about how she got Barton back to reality back during Loki and the New York Invasion and everything else that happened while she and Jane were stranded in Tromsø, but she doubts that would end well for anyone.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Yeah, okay. But you’re not even trying. You’ve just given up. I thought you three were -” He stops and makes a face. “Please don’t make me talk about your great love with Cap and Mother Russia.”

“You’re the one who wanted to talk,” she mutters.

“And you’re the one hiding out in Chinatown and ignoring all your friends so that you don’t have to deal with Barnes and his fucked up head. And Steve is being useless,” Sam replies with a raised eyebrow. “Practically _forcing_ me to …ugh.” He shakes his head.

Darcy sits up, barely holding back a smug grin. “Forcing you to…? Go on, Sam. Please. Continue.”

He sighs. “Fix it,” he finishes with a defeated look. “Man, you’re not the only one with problems.”

“Uh huh. Codependence-Man and Avoidance-Girl strike again.” She says, grinning broadly. “Do we need to talk about your uncontrollable urges to fix people? Maybe set you up with a dream diary?”

“Shut up.” He takes a swig of his beer and sighs again. “You guys are total enablers. Stop having so many problems and maybe I’ll stop cleaning up after you.”

“Yeah, yeah. You love it.”

“Normally? Yeah,” he admits. “Being around all you weirdos makes me feel incredibly sane in comparison. But this is just _sad_.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It is.”

“Okay, so _do_ something about it. I can’t watch you guys tip toe around each other anymore, it’s depressing as hell. And it’s really not okay that you’re not talking to anyone about being attacked by Hydra agents. Seriously, you can’t let that fester. Don’t think I don’t notice you getting all jumpy and weird.”

She doesn’t say anything and Sam leans forward.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this.” Darcy raises an eyebrow. “I mean, I really shouldn’t, because it’s not my business and I live with trained killers. So just - be aware that I know I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“Okay,” she says slowly.

“Bucky’s kind of been stalking you,” he lets out in a single breath, looking simultaneously pained and relieved.

“Um. What?”

“He thinks he’s being subtle, but clearly he’s going a little soft because he’s being the opposite of subtle. Honestly I’m surprised no one else has caught on.”

Darcy tries to train her face into something resembling a human expression, but she’s pretty sure she just looks crazy.

“All that time in Stark’s lab? Totally just an excuse to look at you for a few seconds on his way in and out. And don’t even get me started on him playing messenger. And he’s started bugging the security people about restricting access to the science division floors to -” Sam raises his hands to make air quotes “- increase the safety of the research staff. Which he apparently doesn’t get the irony of, because the guy? Is totally stalking you.”

“Sam,” she starts cautiously. “He’s probably just bored. Or curious. I know I’d be curious about someone I don’t remember who’s seen me naked.”

He winces. “Please don’t remind me. I’m just saying, people don’t make up excuses to do stuff like that because they’re bored. He wants to be around you. And whether you admit or not, you _definitely_ want to be around him. So you guys should. You know. Be around each other. Away from me,” he adds quickly.

Darcy’s heart, without her permission, starts to beat faster. She remembers the first few weeks of trying and not so much being brutally rejected as being completely ignored, and doing that all over again would be just doubly humiliating. She looks away and Sam makes this frustrated noise that he mostly saves for ridiculously difficult levels of Super Mario Bros.

“Darcy, I swear,” he mutters. “Steve’s miserable. Bucky’s miserable. _You’re_ miserable. You’ve gotta take a chance here. Maybe he doesn’t know you right now, but you got him to love you once. You can do it again. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? Everyone’s already unhappy. You telling me there’s a worse scenario out there?”

Sam leaves that night without any sort of promises from her, but he hugs her before he goes and tells her to buck up, which earns him a smack over the head. He laughs and dodges her hand and she closes the door, sliding the chain lock with a degree of satisfaction.

**x**

“Sam thinks I should try to get Bucky to love me again. Like a romantic comedy or something. Like my life is 50 First Dates and I just need to suck it up and woo him with my feminine wiles.”

Jane looks up from her microscope, squinting. “What?”

“I’m just saying I’m not Adam Sandler. I think we can all agree that I’m not Adam Sandler, right?”

“Okay,” Jane agrees. “You’re not Adam Sandler. And Bucky’s not that one girl-”

“Drew Barrymore,” Darcy adds helpfully.

“Yes. Bucky’s not Drew Barrymore.”

“So you think it’s a bad idea, right?”

Jane frowns thoughtfully. “It’s not not a good idea.”

“Huh?”

“Well, the basic problem with that movie is that they’re always starting from scratch because it’s like their first date, right? They can never make any progress and her entire world is structured around what some stranger says her life is. But you guys were together for nearly a year. And Bucky’s brain isn’t going to reset everyday. So he’s not Drew Barrymore and you’re not Adam Sandler,” she finishes, looking pleased with herself. She turns back to her microscope and Darcy fights the urge to sigh.

“But isn’t it kind of fucked up? Like, what if he’s happier not knowing? We had fights and stuff. Big fights,” she emphasizes. “Steve and Bucky don’t fight.”

Jane sits up again, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “Steve and Bucky don’t fight because you’re the only one who makes them deal with their shit. They just avoid and break punching bags and beat up bad guys. _That’s_ why they don’t fight. Not because they’re happier without you.”

“He seems pretty happy,” Darcy mutters, letting a hint of bitterness color her words.

“Darcy,” Jane scolds. “You’re being ridiculous. And you’re making up reasons not to try because you’re scared, which is understandable because Barnes is terrifying, but that doesn’t make it right. You know what you should do.”

“And what if I keep trying and he just ...doesn’t want me,” she asks in a small voice.

“Then that would suck. It would really suck. But trying is better than not trying. I mean, come on, Darcy. He loved you. You made him happy. Or at least less scary and robot-like. And besides, he and Steve make _you_ happy. That’s what matters, right?” Jane nods like she’s solved the problem and smiles at Darcy before going back to her slides and ignoring her entirely for the rest of the day.

**x**

Darcy is going to try. She is. She's going to walk into the common room and start a conversation, and Bucky is going to be overcome with memories of the past year and the music will swell and they'll have a big silver screen moment. Tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Soonish, definitely.


	2. It's All In Your Mind

Bucky isn’t soulless. He’s not soulless, or evil, or completely lacking in human compassion. There’s a difference between what he did before and what he does of his own volition. He knows this. Which is why he also knows he’s a fucking shitstain of a human being right now.

He doesn’t mean to hate the girl - _Darcy_. Darcy. He doesn’t mean to hate her. And he doesn’t. Not really. He just doesn’t understand any of it. In the year Hydra managed to scrub from his brain, he somehow fell so hard for this girl that he lost all sense of reason. He and Steve both, apparently. According to Steve, he loved her. Loved her enough to go back to hell and give the bastards permission to fuck with his head just to keep her safe.

If it weren’t for Steve backing the story up, he wouldn’t believe a word of it.

There’s nothing wrong with Darcy. She’s pretty enough, and she has a good smile, even if the gap in her teeth can make her look a little young. She can be too loud, but mostly when she’s telling off Tony, so he can’t in good conscience fault her for that. As far as he can tell she’s smarter than she looks. She makes Steve happy, as much as it irritates him to acknowledge it.

He wouldn’t give himself up to Hydra for a pretty smile, though. He wouldn’t do that for anyone but Steve, no matter how reformed he is. There has to be something about her that makes her valuable. Something he’s missing. Steve keeps trying to tell him that Bucky loves her as much as he loves Steve. It’s nonsense. Steve’s a goddamn miracle and Darcy - she’s a lab assistant who apparently used to call him _cupcake_ of all things.

He can’t deny that it’s kind of endearing, though. She said it in passing to him a few days after he came back, like it was nothing, and when she realized what she’d said she frowned and blushed pink down to her collar bones. Steve says it’s a joke - that she got so fed up with people treating him seriously that she started calling him pet names to get him to loosen up. He says she started doing it before they were together. Sweetie pie, pumpkin, sugar, sunshine, angel face. She was the only one besides Steve who talked to him like that - like he wasn’t a ticking time bomb. According to Steve, he used to think it was funny. He can imagine her doing it - smirking and calling him babycakes when everyone else refused to look him in the eye. And now she’s the one avoiding him.

Which is the other thing about her - she used to be _everywhere_. It was like she had radar for where he’d be and if she wasn’t already there, she’d be there soon after he arrived. He’d think she was following him if she didn’t startle so badly when she saw him.

But for the past week, she’s been completely gone. No Darcy sitting on the counter in the kitchen, no run-ins in the hallways, no uncomfortable moments. Just nothing. He didn’t notice at first, but he’d started to look forward to seeing her - to trying to figure her out and understand what exactly she was, beyond whatever stories Steve tells him.

“She’s giving you some space,” Steve says when he catches him staring at the armchair in the media room where Darcy would normally be curled up, watching some ridiculous program about amateur models or rich kids at private schools.

“What?” He breaks his stare to look up at Steve and immediately regrets it. Steve looks rumpled and unhappy in a way that needles at Bucky’s heart. Bucky never knows exactly what to say to him after he comes back from Darcy’s place (a bitter _How’s your girlfriend?_ earned him a sharp look the one and only time he tried it). He knows they don’t fuck since Steve is being noble and not picking sides, but it doesn’t really ease the sting. Steve is his. Steve’s always been his. But recently every time he comes back, he looks more and more lost. If it were up to him, Bucky would stop him from going if only to stop seeing that look on his face.

“She’s uh…” Steve scratches behind his ear and Bucky frowns. “She’s going to take some time off work, said she might go home and visit her sister for a while.” He collapses into the couch, looking all but defeated.

This is Bucky’s fault. He should have been kinder. Should’ve spoken to her in full sentences and stopped ignoring her, even if it was just for Steve’s sake.

“How was the head shrink?” Steve is changing the subject. Letting Bucky off the hook for running off his (their) girl.

He rolls his eyes at the question. “Great. I’m _making progress_ ,” he says with a shrug. Steve hums in response and Bucky pauses before continuing. “I did remember something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Nothing big. Just uh, you and me talking about her. On a mission, I think.”

Steve hums again. “She hides stuff when we go out. Candy and stickers and little notes and things. The last time we went after Hydra agents together she wrote ‘Property of Darcy Lewis’ in black marker on your chest. Said it was in case anyone tried to take you.”

Bucky snorts, caught between laughing and seething at the concept.

“She went crazy when you gave yourself up,” Steve continues, a little more sober and not looking at him. “Kept saying you made the wrong choice. She still blames herself. I remember when we finally got there - she was…” He trails off, shaking his head like he can get rid of the memory. “I think that’s half of why she wants to leave.”

Bucky frowns. She can’t leave Steve. Steve doesn’t deserve to be left. “She gonna be gone long?”

Steve shrugs and stands up. “Dunno.” He reaches a hand out to Bucky. “Bed?”

**x**

Bucky wants to feel good. Steve’s got his arm thrown over his waist and he can feel his breath at his neck and _this should feel good_. But he can’t sleep and he can’t stop thinking about the girl staking her claim on him in black ink and blaming herself for his decisions that still don’t make sense. Why would he give up so easily? Even if it was for her, why wouldn’t he fight? From what he knows about that day, he could have easily disarmed that agent. He just walked away from his life and went back to them - for what? He knows he wasn’t defecting. That wasn’t an option. He must have had some reason - some plan or complication. He did this to himself and not knowing why is like an ice pick at the base of his skull.

And then there’s a feeling like something is missing. He knows the bed didn’t used to feel this big and the smells are slightly wrong. There’s Steve - clean sweat and the Ivory soap he uses - and generic laundry detergent and the cotton and spandex stench from the wraps they both use when they box, but something is off. He knows it’s Darcy - the absence of Darcy. He can’t remember ever sleeping next to her, but his body clearly does, and it knows she should be there. There’s a scent clinging to Steve but it’s barely there - not nearly enough to put the balance back.

He shifts under Steve’s weight and shoves a pillow under his arm, thinking he can trick his muscles. It helps, but not by much. After two hours of staring at the digital clock, he gives up and rolls onto his back, inadvertently pushing Steve to the center of the bed.

He props himself up on his good arm so he can look down on him, watching his chest move with every breath, feeling certain that if he just does the appropriate series of actions, says the right things, everything can go back to the way it was. Steve won’t look defeated anymore and there won’t be anything missing because it’s always just been him and Bucky. If he just knew what to do to fix this, then he would do it, and things would be okay again.

He’s too tired to be making any sort of plan of action. It’s been like this since he got back - since Steve crashed into the room they were holding him in and pulled him out. First it was the neverending headaches from whatever shit they did to his brain this time around. And then the night terrors, the phantom pains that had him swinging his fists in his sleep and throttling whatever he hit. Steve still refused to leave him alone at night, even on the bad nights where it took long minutes to get him back to himself. And now that he’s settling, now that his brain is catching up with reality, this girl is invading his thoughts. Even gone, she’s still everywhere.

He puts his metal hand on Steve’s chest, letting it rise and fall with him.

They can get over this. Whatever Bucky needs to do, he’ll do it. He just needs to figure out what that is.

**x**

It takes Bucky three days to work up the nerve to go to her apartment, and he only makes it over because he knows she’s out (knows because he watched her leave, because he’s been hovering outside her building for four hours, watching the curtains in her window). He lets himself in, using the key marked with a dot of red nail polish on his keychain. Her place is much smaller than the apartments at the Tower, but he can see why she would choose to live here instead. It’s kind of a mess - full of knick knacks and books and little odds and ends that look like they came from a flea market. Her red coat is slung over the arm of a couch that sags in the middle.

The apartment smells like her. Vanilla and citrus from candles and something else vaguely comforting and disquieting at the same time. He spends almost a full minute in the doorway, just breathing. He briefly considers stealing something so his bed will smell right again and he can finally get to sleep.

He tries to justify his being here - he knows he’s been here before; according to Steve they spent more time here than anywhere else. He obviously has his own key. If he concentrates he can vaguely remember sitting on that couch.

He explores the space, picking things up and trying to figure out where they fit in her life. There’s a sketchpad tucked in a stack of books on the coffee table. He sets it aside, takes a few steps away and turns back, telling himself Steve has never minded him looking at his stuff. He still feels like he’s spying, though, when he opens it. There’s a few blank pages at the front - Steve was always intimidated by the start of a sketchbook - and then it’s just life drawings. A lot of sketches of a woman’s stomach, with rapt attention to the curve of her side and the shadows leading to her navel. It’s nothing racy, but the more pages he turns the clearer it becomes that they’re all the same woman. He can imagine Darcy posing for him, sitting on the couch in just a bra, or maybe less. Probably reading something off one of those tablets while Steve sketches.

He decides that, previous relationship or not, this is definitely creepy. He puts the book back, arranging it in the stack and shifting everything back to where it was.

He is going to leave, but there’s a pair of his shoes under the couch. They’re barely visible, like he took them off after sitting down and they got kicked underneath.

He checks his watch again and sits on the couch, trying to remember what it was like.

His therapist would call this counterproductive. She would tell him that this is the opposite of trust-building and if he really wants to know more about Darcy then he should ask her instead of casing out her apartment like she’s a mark. And then she would ask him how he _feels_ about his shoes under Darcy’s couch and the fact that he knew which key to use and didn’t have to look up her address.

He feels pretty damn confused, is how he feels.

**x**

He stops pummeling the bag, resting his forehead against the canvas.

“You gonna say something or what?”

The sweats Natasha’s wearing make an annoying swishing noise when she walks. It’s almost embarrassing that she’s trying to sneak up on him when she’s been using scented shampoo and has noisy pants on.

“Maybe I was waiting for you to say something.”

He turns, glaring openly. “I already had my head shrunk today.”

Nat hums in response, tilting her head slightly. Bucky knows that look. He hates that look.

After nearly thirty seconds of uncomfortable eye contact, she nods, like she’s figured something out. “You’ve been sloppy,” she says. “Following her when she goes home, skulking around R&D. I was worried that you’d lost your edge, but that’s not it, is it?”

He says nothing, keeping his face clear of emotion and not snapping back that he wasn't the one who smelled like lavender.

She nods again, and Bucky is close to hating her in this moment for having everything figured out when he’s barely treading water. She doesn’t say anything else, just goes across the room. She doesn’t even face him as she sets up a training dummy. She’s fucking with his head, telling him without words that she thinks he’s a dumbass.

He gives up on working out for the day.

**x**

He doesn’t really know why he started hanging out around Darcy’s lab. Doctor Foster’s lab. It’s obvious it's Darcy’s, though. It’s like a sanitized version of her apartment: comfortable couches and splashes of color mingled in with the machinery and lab tables.

One day he was in an elevator and without thinking about it he was pushing in his keycode for her floor. Once he got out he didn’t know what he was doing there, so he just kept walking down the hall until he got to Tony’s lab. He made up some problem with his arm (which did have an insignificant dent in the ring finger) and let Tony use his tools to mess around with it. The older (younger, Bucky reminded himself) man kept his music (not music at all) playing so loudly that neither could hear the other one talk, and that was fine with Bucky.

On his way back, he slowed to glance out of the corner of his eye inside Foster’s lab. Darcy was hunched over her computer, a stack of notebooks next to her.

He thinks if he’d been able to see her face that day he might have avoided the routine he developed next. The one where he consciously punches in his keycode, goes deliberately to the R&D floor and willingly spends time with Tony Stark just for the few moments in between the elevator and Stark’s lab where Darcy is clearly visible from behind glass doors.

The third time that he does this he’s forced to acknowledge that it’s not about making sure she’s okay or alleviating his own guilt. He wants to see her.

There are new synapses firing again in his brain, telling him that she’s important. It doesn’t feel like when he started to remember Steve again. Not in the slightest. Steve came back to him in a slow leak of sensory information: the callous on Steve’s fourth finger from his drawing pencils, the way the needle felt between Bucky’s fingers whenever he had to stitch him up. The terror that clenched his heart when Steve showed up in Zola’s lab and he was Steve but also he wasn’t and for a moment he was sure the both of them were already dead. He saw him on the bridge and everything from that point on was just an affirmation of what he already knew. It was just new information that clarified the how and why of Steve being his home.

All he has of Darcy is an odd sensation in the back of his mind that she’s familiar somehow. Like catching the scent of something that he knows is connected to a memory, but not being able to place it. The scent or the memory or anything that could help him.

So he makes up reasons to go to R&D, because surely if he can see her like he saw Steve, something will click. And then she starts putting her back to him. To the doors, not him, he tries to reason. She’s minimizing distractions. He knows, despite the time off, that she’s dedicated to Foster’s work. She’s just minimizing distractions.

If he was in more control of himself, he would take that as a sign and save himself the trips, but he gets caught up looking at her hair - the way she shoves errant strands behind her ears or piles it gracelessly on top of her head. If he focuses, he can almost feel it between his fingers.

He has a flash of a memory of looking down on her in what must have been her bed, the image overwhelmed by her smile and her hair tangled in the fingers of his metal hand. It’s gone before he can process it and he clenches his fingers, fighting the urge to scratch at his face.

That image is the only explanation he can find for swiping his key card at the door to her lab. He pauses as the doors open and tries to think of any reason to be in that room. He remembers Tony mentioning something about Foster’s machines and manages to put together a coherent phrase - something to say so that he’s there to be useful.

Darcy doesn’t look up from her work the entire time he’s in the room, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s close enough to see the light in her hair and smell citrus and he leaves with a memory of being in this room once before, holding a box and watching her talk with animated hands. He can’t remember what she was saying, but the image is enough.

It becomes something of an addiction.

Steve leaves in the mornings to run with Sam and do whatever it is he needs to do to feel less lost and Bucky waits until he knows Darcy will be at work. Sometimes he lasts until the afternoon, and some days he convinces himself to stay away, but he inevitably finds himself back in that space, mining it for whatever he can find.

The memories, if they come at all, are always insignificant. Brief images from a previous life that’s slowly starting to feel less foreign. He sees her running towards him when he’s still in his armor, tugging at his hair in the kitchen, smiling broadly at him from across the room.

He freezes in front of Foster when a particular image hits him, and it takes everything he has not to run back out to the hall. Darcy, less than fifteen feet away from him in the lab, sitting on his hips in Steve and Bucky’s bed and pulling a shirt - _his_ shirt, stretching over her chest and gaping at the collar - over her head. When he makes it back to the elevator he hates himself a little for wanting so badly for the memory to continue, but no matter how hard he concentrates, he can’t force the memory past the white of her stomach.

He jerks off in the shower imagining what might have happened next and treats Steve like shit for the rest of the night. Steve takes it, because he’s a better man than Bucky will ever be, and Bucky adds it to the list of things he’s fucking up.

Darcy starts putting headphones over her ears whenever he comes in, and a small not-sane part of him is certain that she knows and hates him for it too.

He stops coming into the lab. When Steve comes back to their apartment, asking what happened (because Bucky’s never been quite as good an actor as Steve), Bucky slams his mouth against his and tries to chase away any thoughts of her. It doesn’t work, but Steve inside him for the first time since this started is enough to crowd out the worst of it. He tells him he loves him and means it. Means it more than anything. But he can’t get over the split in his head. The voice saying that he never used to think of anyone else. He wonders if Steve is thinking about her too and can’t decide if that makes him jealous or turned on or pissed off.

That night the rest of the memory comes in his dreams, and for the first time he can hear her voice, calling him buttercup and laughing when he tips her over backwards into Steve’s arms.

**x**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally going to have a bit more plot, so it's probably going to end up being four chapters instead of three. As it stands, everything's caught up timeline wise between POVs, so I'll have to see what makes the most sense for the final chapter. Maybe a Steve POV to round it out?


	3. End of the Day

There’s a scene playing itself over and over again in Darcy’s head on an endless loop. It speeds up during the bearable parts and slows down for the parts she wishes she could write over in black marker, like a confidential file with all the interesting information covered up. It starts with the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in her pocket, and Steve’s voice in her ear telling her that they’ve got him and they’re nearly home. She sees herself running to the elevator, pushing the call button in a rapid repetition and holding back tears when it takes what feels like hours to arrive. She hears the noise of the helicopter, feels her hair whipping around her face, and then there’s Bucky, walking towards her.

She tries to run to him, but the blowback of the blades keeps her from going fast enough. She yells his name, but her voice gets lost in the noise and he doesn’t respond. And then he’s not walking toward her, he’s walking past her, his head hunched to avoid the wind, and she reaches out to touch him. He doesn’t see her. It’s like that nightmare she used to have about being dead and not knowing it, except very real.

She sees that exact moment in her mind every time she chooses between the button in the elevator for the lobby and the button for the Avengers common floor.

There are plenty of other moments - the first few days when Steve invited her over for dinner and Bucky sat in near silence through every meal, glaring at her like she was an intruder and he was deciding whether she warranted the effort to pull out one of his knives. Steve kept trying to convince her to come back, but she gave up on the dinners quick.

She misses hearing his voice. She misses laughing with him and his little jibes at Steve and the way he always looked to her when Tony said something stupid so they could roll their eyes at him together. She misses sex, dear _god_ she misses sex. The kind of sex that isn’t just about rubbing up against someone. Sex that she’d call “making love” if it didn’t gross her out so much.

She misses the way he smells, the way he’d use her shampoo when his ran out and then he’d spend the day smelling like her.

But mostly she just misses the recognition in his eyes when he saw her. The way he would look at her when she walked into a room like it didn’t matter what else was going on because she was there and he just needed to look at her.

She’s used to men staring at her. She got used to it when she was fourteen and her shirts stopped fitting and men started shouting things at her from their cars. She knows with one hundred percent certainty that most men look at her and see tits and nothing else. A lot of women, too, if the nicknames she got in high school were any indication. But Bucky looked at her like he saw her.

The complete lack of recognition on his face hits her harder than her too-big bed and the full coffee pot and everything else combined. And this particular memory, the one where he’s walking toward her until he’s not and he doesn’t see her at all, has been repeatedly punching her in the gut every time she says to herself that today will be the day.

On this day, despite her best intentions, she goes straight to the lobby. She has a sinking feeling in her stomach that she can’t attribute to the elevator, and it feels a lot like shame, or cowardice, or something else that she should not be feeling because Darcy is not a coward. She’s lived through alien invasions, kidnapping attempts, _actual bullets_ in her car from unhinged would-be assassins. And for the most part, she’s been along for the ride. Shit gets scary and she rolls with it.

Darcy is not a coward.

Which is why, after arguing with herself the entire ride down to the lobby, she punches the button for the common floor with her palm, continuing to argue with herself the entire ride back up until the doors open.

At the very least, she’s relatively certain that there won’t be open gunfire.

**x**

It feels a little anticlimactic. She walks into the common kitchen for the first time in over a month and it’s empty. Everything’s the same as it was, and there’s still her favorite brand of hot chocolate mix stored above the microwave, so she sets about to make herself a cup, thinking all the while that this moment should feel bigger.

“Darce?”

And there it is. The big moment. She turns, trying for a casual expression. He’s clearly just back from the gym, with his hair still damp and his shirt clinging to his chest, and it nearly stops her heart how just unbelievably beautiful he is. She’s seen pictures, so she knows he was cute before, but science went above and beyond for those abs. She used to feel at least a little desensitized to it, but the weeks since she saw him last must have worn her memories down, because he’s overwhelming. And _tall_.

“Hey Steve.” She can’t help her nervous smile, especially when he stops just out of arm’s length from her.

“You’re here,” he says, a little bit of wonder coloring his voice. He seems to come back to himself and takes that final step forward before crushing her into his arms. The smell of his cologne hits her and she feels tears pricking her eyes.

“Hey,” she says, squeezing him tighter. He lifts her onto her toes and presses his face into her shoulder before letting her go. She looks up at him and sniffs, trying to hold back tears. “Hi Steve.”

“Hello Darcy.” And _oh god_ , his smile. She can’t help but hug him again, this time standing on her toes and wrapping her arms around his neck instead of his waist.

“I miss you,” she says into his hair. “Like, way too much.”

“I miss you, too,” he replies softly.

“I stay up way too late now,” she says with a shaky laugh. “You aren’t there to take my laptop away. I need boundaries and rules and stuff. How am I supposed to take care of myself without an enforcer?”

His arms cinch as tightly as they can around her rib cage, to the point that it hurts, but she doesn’t budge.

When she finally steps back, she has to wipe tears from under her eyes. She shakes her head, laughing at herself.

“ _God_ , I miss you,” she says, still shaking her head.

“We could run away together,” he suggests with a smile. “Skip town and never look back.”

“I like it,” she says. “I’ll be Thelma, you be Louise. We can steal one of Tony’s convertibles.”

“Didn’t they die in the end?”

“Okay yeah, but they died _in a blaze of glory_. I don’t see what you’re complaining about.”

“Alright. So it’s settled.” He pulls out his phone, pressing a few buttons and holding it up to his ear. “Yeah, hey Tony.”

Darcy’s eyes go wide and she reaches for the phone, but Steve twists away, holding up one finger. “Don’t be rude,” he tells her, holding his palm over the phone. “I’m going to need to borrow a car,” he says into the phone. “A convertible. Preferably one with a back seat - ”

Darcy jumps and finally snatches the phone from Steve’s hand. “Never mind, bye,” she says into it, before ending the call. “Steven Grant Rogers, I _swear_ you are the biggest dork in the world.” The phone rings and they both ignore it.

He grins, unrepentant. “So no roadtrip?”

She hits his shoulder and glares. “With your luck, you’d probably survive the stupid car crash anyways. I’d be pancake, but you’d just be brushing off dust and walking away.”

“Like I’d ever let you drive us off a cliff,” he scoffs.

“No,” she says, “You’re Louise. You’re the driver.”

“Well then no one’s going off a cliff, okay? We’ll go to Canada instead.”

“Okay. Canada.” She adds, “We’ll have to put Bucky in the trunk to get him to go along with it, huh.”

“Probably,” Steve agrees, deflating a bit.

There’s a pause and Darcy bites her lip.

“I don’t - ” She sighs. “This situation is really weird and I don’t know what I’m allowed to do or if _you’re_ feeling weird and it’s just very ...confusing,” she finishes with a shrug.

He scrubs his face, blowing air through his lips. “Yeah. I’d say we should still be friends, but - ”

“I don’t want to be your friend,” Darcy says with a laugh. “Like, at _all_.”

Steve shakes his head. “Me either. Being your friend was awful.”

“ _Right?_ It was totally awful. Like, pretending not to be madly in love with you is kind of exhausting.”

“Yeah,” he says softly.

“So,” she starts. “So, I’m gonna try. With Bucky. I have to, right?” She looks at him searchingly. “Because otherwise…” she trails off, not wanting to say what they both already know. Steve closes his eyes when she doesn’t finish, his brow furrowed.

“He’s still Bucky,” he says, looking at her again. “He’s the same person. He came back to me, right?”

“Yeah,” she agrees with false bravado. “It’ll work.”

Steve scoffs. “You kidding me? He fell for you so fast. Now he’s just being stubborn.”

“‘Cause I’m irresistible?”

“Completely,” he agrees.

Bucky doesn’t show up, but Darcy figures this is a big enough step for the day. When she goes home that night, she even manages to feel a little bit hopeful.

**x**

Darcy has been ineffectually googling ideas on how to seduce your ex. She’s mostly doing it out of boredom and the potential for laughs, but Cosmo online advising her to “casually reminisce over funny, romantic, or exciting times you had together” during a low-key coffee date makes her wish that there were advice columns for people like her who had to deal with ridiculous shit. She’s nearly certain Pepper could write a weekly column about dating a loose cannon superhero but a) Pepper’s busy being a superhero herself, and b) it still wouldn’t be all that helpful for Darcy’s current situation.

Either way, she couldn’t exactly start a conversation with Bucky with “Remember the time we drove upstate for vacation and some guys in a black SUV started shooting at us on the highway?” Even if he could remember that trip, it would still probably be a bad plan considering Steve got a bullet lodged in his shoulder and after Bucky pulled it out they spent the entire stay forcing him to get back in bed while he insisted over and over again that he was fine. So yeah, it was exciting, but not exactly romantic. It was maybe a teensy bit funny, when she took into account Steve pouting over bedrest, but still not a solid memory to reminisce on.

If she’s honest with herself, most of their vacations or dates ended up like that. Blood, dirt, and in one particularly gross instance, slime got involved way more than anyone would like. She’d stopped wearing heels long before her last date with Bucky ended in a hostage situation, and she knew to order dessert first when they went out to dinner.

It should have bugged her, but it really, really didn’t. To the point where she almost found it funny. Every time Steve and Bucky’s cell phones started ringing simultaneously in the middle of a date, she had to laugh, because it was just _funny_. When she dragged them out to see an awful indie band and the mission-specific ringtone started playing between songs and they were both trying so hard not to look relieved? How could she not laugh at that?

When she considers telling Bucky stupid stories about failed dates and vacation mishaps, she gets this weird feeling in her stomach like anxiety and possessiveness mixed together. She loves those stories. The idea of him not being impressed doesn’t sit right with her at all.

She feels like any attempt to remind him of what they had would be like trying to sell him something. Like a “If you lived here, you’d be home now” billboard.

So the plan is to just ...talk.

Which is how she ended up sitting in the media room, with just five or so feet between her and Bucky, and the both of them staring at the television, saying nothing.

It might be easier if what they were watching was at all interesting, but reruns of Top Chef don’t really inspire conversation. Now she’s just slightly hungry and kind of bored and anxious at the same time.

She gives up, grabbing the remote from where it sits between them and changing the channel.

“Oh, I love this movie,” she says with thinking. She grits her teeth just after she says it, avoiding the impulse to wince.

Bucky looks over, his face impassive. “Yeah?”

She gestures at the screen with the remote. “So they’re on this bus, but there’s a bomb and it’ll detonate if they go slower than - ” she pauses. “It’s a stupid movie. It makes no sense and it’s totally ridiculous, but I find the complete lack of regard for the laws of physics refreshing.”

He gives her a look like he’s not sure if she’s joking. “Keep it on.”

“Okay, speeding bus bomb it is.”

After watching for a few minutes, he looks to her again. “Where’s the bus?”

“Well, first it’s the elevator. Keanu has to save the day.” The elevator jerks to a stop on the screen, with all the hostages screaming. “See?”

“You’re right,” Bucky says. “This makes no sense.”

“But awesome, right?”

He rolls his eyes. “Sure.”

Considering this is the most he’s spoken to her in months, Darcy takes this as a significant triumph. And if she gets to watch Keanu kicking ass while she triumphs, then that’s just a bonus.

**x**

Bucky still doesn’t approach her, or talk to her unless she initiates it, but after the success of what she’s been referring to privately as their speed date, because she’s _hilarious_ , she finds it a lot easier to barge in on his life and force him to at least acknowledge her existence.

She’s back to eating lunch on the common floor during her breaks, and she finally fixed things with Natasha with a box of macarons from her favorite bakery - the one that uses real almonds instead of the extract. Nat kissed her on the cheek and took the box back to her apartment, probably to hide it from Clint, so she knows things are back to normal.

Mostly everyone pretends nothing’s different, but then there’s no accounting for Tony.

He emerges from his lab after a week long bender with his robots and soldering tools and does a literal double take when he sees Darcy on the counter.

“Are we not going to mention this?” he asks the room. “This is a big deal, right?” He waves his arms, gesturing broadly at Darcy, who rolls her eyes. “I mean, come on, big tragic thing? Darcy the hermit? Ringing any bells?”

She looks back down at her magazine, idly flipping the pages.

“Shouldn’t we be celebrating? _Drinks_. There should be drinking. Jarvis - ”

“It’s eleven in the morning, Tony,” Steve says dryly. “How about we celebrate Darcy eating lunch later.”

“You,” Tony says, pointing at Steve. “You should be happy. Why aren’t you happy?” He looks back to her. “Is it because - ”

Darcy interrupts him with a sharp look, shaking her head. And then, because god isn’t on her side today, or _ever_ when Tony’s involved, Bucky walks through the door.

“Did you know about this?” Tony immediately accuses Bucky. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

Bucky stops, eyeing him with a calculating glare. “Know about what,” he asks blankly.

Tony gestures back to Darcy. “This! The thing with the sitting and the elephant in the room. Not that you’re not a great-looking elephant, Darcy, but - ”

She can see the muscles in Bucky’s jaw working. “You should stop talking now.”

Tony tilts his head, raising his eyebrows. “So we’re not going to address the - ”

“Stop. Talking,” Bucky repeats, moving past him to take a bottle of water from the fridge. He doesn’t look at her, but he’s still clenching his jaw and his shoulders are set.

“Okay,” Darcy draws out, slipping down from the counter. “I’m going back to work now. Enjoy being an asshole, Tony.”

“Will do,” he calls after her.

**x**

“This is my favorite movie of all time,” she tells Bucky, getting an odd feeling of deja vu because they’ve already seen this movie together. Several times, in fact. She watches The Fifth Element often enough that everyone she knows has seen it at least once.

He nods, staring at the screen instead of looking at her.

She bites her lip and looks back at the television. Every time she gets the urge to comment on something, it occurs to her that she’s probably already said it, and then it just feels contrived and weird. Like dinner theater or something equally embarrassing.

He snorts when Leeloo is learning about earth’s history. “That easy, huh?” he mutters, his lips turned up slightly at one end.

“It always reminds me of Steve,” Darcy offers with a grin. “With all his history books?”

A few minutes later he jerks his head at the screen, where Zorg is monologuing about robots and capitalism. “If Steve’s the girl, Stark’s that guy.”

She hides a laugh behind her fist. “Definitely,” she agrees. “Robots and arms manufacturing and a disembodied voice in his ear. Stark all the way.”

She fidgets at the climax, with Leeloo saying she wasn’t built for love and the big declarations, but Bucky just stares at the screen, a wrinkle forming between his eyebrows.

“So?” she asks when it’s over.

All he says is “Good movie,” and then he gets up and leaves.

**x**

Bucky brushes against her in the hallway and doesn’t flinch or recoil or do anything else to communicate complete disgust with her. She’s a little pathetic for counting that as a victory, but she’s cool with pathetic at this point.

After that, he stops keeping the mandated five feet distance between them, and occasionally, _occasionally_ , says more than five words at a time to her. They watch movies together, but it's always by accident. They exchange words in passing, exist in the same room and Bucky doesn't glare when Steve talks to her. It goes like this for about three weeks, and Darcy is starting to feel a little like her miniature triumphs are actually a plateau. That’s when, of course, someone else decides to put a gun to her head and start demanding stuff.

It’s getting pretty fucking old is all she’s saying.

**x**

She used to think of the world as being divided into two groups: the good guys and the bad guys. And to a certain degree, that’s still true. But both groups come in all sorts of different flavors, and none of them wear special identifying signs.

The newest lab rat in Jane’s employ, as it turns out, is part of that second group, and he doesn’t even do anyone the courtesy of saying so until he’s pressing a gun, held in a very shaky hand, to her temple, yelling about the specs for the Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Here are the facts: Darcy is one of three people with complete access to Jane’s research and she is also the one responsible for keeping up the firewalls that protect the digital records. More facts: sometimes, when people believe they deserve something, they’re willing to do pretty much anything to get it, including holding a gun to the head of one of the few people who can give them what they want.

And finally: even Steve, superhero that he is, cannot actually move faster than a speeding bullet.

All of these facts coalesce into the current situation. Darcy understands this very clearly. It makes sense. But the rational part of her brain is slowly shutting down in favor of repeating, very softly so as not to startle the nervous guy with the gun, the word “fuck” until it has lost all meaning.

Darcy’s last words might be “fuck, fuck, fuck” and there’s really not much she can do about it, because, again, rational thought has left the building.

Steve’s eyes are wide. Like, saucer-wide. Steve’s eyes are as wide as saucers. She thinks the stupid idiom finally makes sense, because Steve’s eyes are definitely as wide as saucers right now. He’s wearing street clothes and he’s got his hands up like he’s caught in a weird gesture trying to get someone to calm down. Probably the would-be terrorist, but Darcy could use a little calming herself.

Steve is looking more and more desperate, and it’s really not helping her blood pressure. It’s just occurred to her that she really has to pee, and she hopes that if she _does_ die, she doesn’t immediately piss herself.

“Just give me the goddamn code,” terrorist-guy says, his voice shaking. Darcy is half way to wondering if they give villains a script at their bi-monthly meetings. “101 Things to Say In a Hostage Situation” or “10 Cliches Guaranteed to Help You in Your Quest for World Domination.”

“We’ll give you what you want. I promise,” Steve says, sounding calmer than he looks. “Just let her go. Point the gun at me. You don't want to hurt her. Point the gun at me.”

She hears someone say no. It’s a woman’s voice, which makes no sense, since it’s just her and Steve and the guy who wants to use Jane’s research to do nefarious villain things. Right.

“No,” she repeats. “No, I can’t.” She’s saying things. She should be repeating the stupid codes to get past the firewall and into the encrypted files like soldiers in the movies repeat their serial numbers, but she’s saying other things. Stupid things. Stupid, _stupid_ things.

Steve breaks eye contact with gun-guy to look at her.

“The bridge is secure for a _reason_ ,” she says, looking straight back at Steve and trying to ignore the press of metal at her temple. “You remember the invasion,” she whispers when the pressure increases, as if the guy's pissed at the volume and not the content of what she's saying.

“Do you want to _die_?” lab rat barks in her ear. She’s busy thinking about what a stupid threat that is, given the circumstances, when she hears a strange click next to her ear. It’s almost comical, because cocking a gun sounds exactly like it does in the movies, and she’s pretty sure she’s seen a Mythbusters episode about gun-related sound effects before.

“No, no, no, no,” she says quickly. “I don’t want to die, I don’t, fuck, _fuck_ \- ”

She’s still rambling when the guy slumps over, his grip on her arm suddenly going slack. She can see Steve’s mouth moving as he rushes toward her, but all she hears is a weird ringing in her ears. She’s pretty sure she’s not dead, but she’s also pretty sure that’s blood going down her cheek. Or maybe tears? She can’t remember crying but it seems like a situation where crying would be expected.

She wipes absently at her face and then stares at her hand. Her glasses got knocked off a while ago, but that’s still a lot of red. Like, _a lot._

Steve grabs her, pulling her into his arms and saying something in her ear that comes out like a teacher in a Charlie Brown strip, but it feels really good, a lot better than that guy and the gun.

Steve lets her go abruptly, and then someone else is turning her around - Bucky, who came from _nowhere_ , is turning her around - and suddenly this day is turning out way differently than she thought it would, because he’s hugging her, and nope, yeah. She’s definitely crying.

It’s cool though, because Bucky’s holding her and talking and she recognizes his angry tone as his “you idiot, you nearly died and that’s _not okay_ ” voice. She’s laughing now, gripping his shirt with her hands, and it occurs to her that _of course_ her big silver screen moment would happen with blood on her face and a dead wannabe terrorist lying on the ground a few feet away.

She’s still gripping his shirt when he pulls back a little, grasping her chin in one hand. He shakes his head and kisses her, and that’s when everything kind of goes black.


	4. Sunday Sun

“I saw her today,” Steve says. He’s well on his way to pacing, and he has his shoulders set, the same way he does when he’s gearing up for a fight.

“Yeah?” Bucky’s trying to keep his voice impassive, trying to avoid a fight - _the_ fight, the one where Steve tells him he’s had enough and he’s leaving for someone who smiles easier and doesn’t wake up from nightmares with his hands around Steve’s throat. The fight Steve insists will never happen but always seems to loom over Bucky’s shoulder.

“I didn’t do anything,” Steve says in a rush. “I hugged her, but we didn’t - I didn’t do anything.”

“Okay.”

“I wanted to, though. The entire time we were talking, I wanted to kiss her. But I knew I couldn’t do that, I _wouldn’t_ do that to you, so I kept hoping that she would kiss me. So that way I could still say that I didn’t cheat. I could object and tell her that it wasn’t right, but the thing is, it _would_ be. It wouldn’t be cheating because _you loved her_ ,” Steve finishes, his fists clenched.

Bucky stares at him, his chest tight. “You want to leave?”

“ _No_.” He shakes his head, clearly frustrated. “I just need you - I need you to tell me if you feel anything at all. _Anything_. Because I can’t stop hoping that you’re going to wake up and realize we’re _losing_ her. Bucky, I need you to tell me it’s never going to happen, or give me something. Tell me you’re willing to try. Anything.”

Bucky pauses. “I thought about her during sex the other night,” he offers.

Steve looks at him incredulously, and then lets out a laugh. “You ...you. Okay. I guess I asked for that.” He laughs again, shaking his head. “ _Really_?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Bucky defends. “Some of the new memories are fucking with my head. It’s not my fault.”

“Bucky,” Steve starts, still grinning, holding back laughter. “I’m not upset. I’m just ...surprised, I guess. I don’t know why I would be, that was pretty much how it started with you two.”

Bucky frowns. “It started with me thinking about her during sex?”

“It started with you trying to hide how you felt about her and pretending she didn’t exist. I had to get you half drunk for you to admit that you wanted her.”

“You didn’t tell me that part before.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t want to talk much about her. Figured you had the right to recoup.”

“And now?”

“And now - I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to push, because god knows you’ve been through - ” He pauses, scrubbing his face with his hands. “She deserves more, Buck. She thinks she doesn’t, but she does. And so do you.”

Bucky frowns, about to say that Steve’s enough, Steve’s always been enough, but Steve shakes his head.

“You don’t get it. And it’s not your fault that you don’t, but it doesn’t change - ” He sighs. “She makes things better. She’s this missing piece neither of us knew about until we just _knew_ , and I can’t - I don’t want to lose her. You wouldn’t either.”

“I think I’m starting to see that,” Bucky replies quietly.

Steve pulled him into his arms and pressed his forehead to his before kissing Bucky’s brow.

“You don’t need to fix everything now,” he promises. “Just _try_.”

“You gonna leave me if it doesn’t work out?”

Steve’s hesitation gives Bucky an icy feeling in his chest. “No,” he says finally. “But if that happens - It would be hard. We’d need to figure things out.”

“Like you wanting to kiss her.”

“Yeah.”

Bucky nods. “I think maybe I want to kiss her too,” he admits, feeling foolish.

“Of course you do,” Steve says, hiding his worry like he always does. “Everyone would want to kiss Darcy. She’s a fantastic kisser.”

Bucky snorts. “Don’t oversell it.”

“I’m _not_ ,” Steve replies. “You just wait. You’re going to eat your words, and then you’ll be taking up all of Darcy’s time necking in inappropriate places and it’ll be a year ago all over again.”

“Don’t say necking,” Bucky scolds. “You sound like an old man.”

**x**

Bucky wants to try - to do this for Steve, who’s done everything for him. Talking to a pretty girl instead of watching her from a distance is nothing compared to charging into enemy territory over and over again to pull Bucky out. But at this moment, in spite of everything, he thinks he’d take a doomed mission over this.

She’s in the media room, watching a show about cooking, which he doesn’t understand in the slightest, and he reminds himself that she _wants_ him to be in there with her. But all the same, when he sits down, he immediately starts wondering what he would have said or done in that other life. He’d have definitely sat next to her, maybe put his arm around her. Maybe they’d be _necking_ , as Steve put it, instead of sitting silently, watching people argue about food. His brain starts to lay images one over the other, imagining her straddling his legs on the couch and leaning in to kiss him. At this point it’s hard to tell what’s a memory and what’s just a fantasy. And he shouldn’t be thinking about her like this, not when they were more than that. But he still does, can still imagine (remember?) what her skin feels like under his fingers. He shifts, trying to focus on anything but the images in his mind, when Darcy speaks - he looks up and sees she’s changed the station without him even realizing.

She starts talking about the movie, saying things about bombs and physics, and he has to fight to keep his face clear.

She looks really beautiful.

From that moment on he does his best to focus on the screen.

Steve looks pleased as punch when he comes back home, and Bucky doesn’t have the heart to tell him he was probably an asshole to her. He _is_ trying, but he knows that now - as things are - he’s the weak link in this scenario. He needs to do more. 

**x**

Bucky isn’t immediately aware that there’s a situation in Darcy’s lab. He hears the alarm, sees people running, and assumes it’s something else - some security breach that has nothing to do with the R&D floor because he just saw Darcy and she was fine. She was going to the elevators and she said hello as she passed by and smiled and Darcy was fine. She _is_ fine.

The connection between Darcy going to the elevators and the alarm blaring burns in his mind for less than a second before he starts running. There’s a group crowded around the entrance to the lab, blocking his view. He shoves a man in kevlar aside and finally sees her - sees the man holding tightly to her upper arm, the cheap handgun pressed to her temple and the shaking hand attached to it.

Even if the man doesn’t intend to pull the trigger, everything about the situation is unstable.

He pushes back at the line of overblown security guards, jerking his head toward the hall until they see sense and back away. He can hear Steve talking, using a soothing tone to try to cajole the gun out of his hands, but with every word the man grows more agitated, and Darcy -

He can’t look at Darcy.

There are ceiling tiles in the lab. Sturdy, but moveable, barely enough to hold thirty pounds. The rails will have to hold him. He only needs a minute - maybe less. There’s access from Stark’s lab and if he can move fast enough, if he can make it -

He can hear her saying no, repeating it over and over, and it feels uncomfortably familiar. He’s been here before, but this man - this boy - is no trained assassin, and he doesn’t hear Bucky shifting a tile aside to clear a line of vision. Part of him wishes he could draw this out, get in front of him so that he knows exactly why he has to die, but the shot is easy, and squeezing the trigger is one of the easiest choices he’s ever made with a gun in his hands. It occurs to him, when the body falls, that this is what Steve was talking about when he was rambling about missing pieces and _knowing_.

He drops down and watches as Steve pulls her into his arms, and then finds himself behind her, turning her around and wrapping his arms around her.

“You idiot,” he says into her hair. “You complete _idiot_ , you couldn’t just give him what he wanted?” He squeezes her tighter and sees Steve behind her, looking like he’s having an asthma attack, but still smiling somehow.

She laughs, and when he pulls back there are tears mingling with the blood on her face. He feels the urge to do more and decides that he’s done with whatever it was holding him back. If it ever mattered, it doesn’t now, so he presses his lips to hers and knows with complete certainty that Steve was right. About _everything_.

And then she goes limp. He catches her, pulling her up into his arms, and flashes his eyes to Steve.

“She always do this?” he asks, adjusting his grip.

“I think you can forgive her,” Steve chides.

**x**

It makes sense that there’s an entire floor of the tower dedicated to patching people up, given, well, everything. They’ve run all the mandatory tests and decided that Darcy, despite her penchant for unconsciousness, is fine, barring a slight case of anemia and dehydration. She woke up hours ago and began insisting that she wanted her pants back, but they’ve got her holed up in a room with her laptop and a spare set of glasses, so she’s stopped complaining so much.

Bucky hasn’t seen her since he and Steve brought her in. Mostly it’s been a parade of Avengers and Avengers-affiliated persons in and out of her room. Tony, asshole that he is, flew back early from LA just to call her an idiot and yell at the medical staff that they’d all be fired if she wasn’t treated right. He thinks no one else heard that part, but Tony has yet to be subtle in the years that Bucky’s known him.

Sam stays in her room for close to half an hour, and when he comes out he smiles and puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder as he walks past him.

After checking in on her when she woke up, Steve sits next to him nearly the whole time. He says “I’ll see her when you see her,” and after that, no matter what Bucky says, he doesn’t budge. Steve’s a passive aggressive little shit, but it’s effective.

After the last person leaves (Foster, who yells for a few minutes and leaves with red eyes), Bucky stands, looking to Steve warily.

“You go ahead,” Steve says, waving his hand carelessly. “I’m just getting to the good part.” He holds up a rag magazine.

“ _Cap Cheating on Stark With Black Widow_?” Bucky reads out loud. There’s a grainy picture of Steve in uniform, standing in front of Nat in her catsuit. “Really?”

“Shhh.” Steve holds a finger to his lips. “It’s a secret affair.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You’re really just going to sit there. Darcy could’ve _died_ ,” he says.

“But she didn’t. And now she’s fine. Thanks to you. So go talk to her. Maybe kiss her again,” he suggests, looking back down at the article.

Bucky huffs, but Steve just keeps reading. Passive aggressive _asshole_.

Darcy’s sitting up when he comes in, grumbling at her phone. She has a tube trailing from the crook of her arm, and she’s still wearing a hospital gown, but they’ve cleaned the blood and someone’s braided her hair. Probably Natasha - she always gets fidgety around hospitals and inevitably finds something to do with her hands. But Darcy’s fine. She’s _fine_.

“Does everyone in the state know about this?” she mutters to herself. “Was there like a mass text or something?”

He sits in the chair next to her bed. “You want to be left alone?”

She looks over, squinting at him. “I want my pants back.”

He shrugs. “Fair enough.”

“So…” she starts. “Thanks for saving my life?” She shifts, fiddling with the IV.

“Don’t touch that,” he says automatically, and she makes an exaggerated scowling face at him. He pauses. “You told me not to go with them.” The memory has been banging around in his head, the half-formed answer to a question he’s had from the moment Steve told him who Darcy was.

“What?”

“That day. You kept saying _no_. He would have killed you, and you kept saying no. Why would you do that?”

Darcy laughs humorlessly. “Honestly? I kind of thought there would be a backup plan.” She motions with her hand. “Or, you know, some miracle where I tell you not to do it, and everyone besides us dies of an aneurysm or something. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I’d be dead. It wasn’t like, some great heroic gesture.”

He snorts. “You’re smarter than that, Darcy.”

“Maybe. You don’t really know, though, do you? Maybe I’m just really that stupid.” Her smile is fake and plastic.

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re selfless.” Like Steve, he wants to add.

She rolls her eyes. “Come on. I know I’m infirmed and everything, but you don’t need to do this.”

He shakes his head. “I remember that day. I remember knowing what I had to do. And it had nothing to do with strategy, or some bigger plan. I needed you to be alive. And then you tried to stop me, and I knew - I knew I was doing the right thing.” The words keep forming without Bucky’s permission, like he’s channeling some past version of himself rather than recalling a memory. It’s uncomfortable.

Darcy isn’t looking at him.

“You did the same thing today. The same _stupid_ thing,” he continues.

“I’m pretty sure I was possessed,” she deflects.

He huffs, shaking his head again. “You and Steve… I get it now. You’re both nuts. I’m doomed to love reckless hero-types with no concern for their own well-being.”

Her eyes flash to his, wide and cautious.

“I don’t - ” he starts. “I can’t remember everything. Not yet.”

“Okay,” she says slowly.

“I remember what it felt like to love you. I think that could be the same thing as loving you now. I’m not sure. It’s kind of confusing,” he says, as honestly as he can.

She nods, her eyes still wide and her face blank.

“Now would be a good time to tell me it’s not too late,” he suggests.

“It’s not too late,” she says automatically.

“I don’t know how this works,” he admits.

“You could kiss me,” she suggests, watching her hands. “If you wanted.”

He nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

He stands slowly. There’s barely a step between the chair and the bed, and Darcy isn’t helping - she’s just sitting, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap. She looks up at him and her face remains the same, but he can see her breaths coming faster.

“Steve says once I start kissing you, I won’t want to stop.” Once again the words leave his mouth without his permission, and he has to hold back from rolling his eyes at himself.

Darcy raises her eyebrows. “Well then. No pressure, huh?”

He brings his metal hand to her cheek, testing her for any sign of revulsion. She doesn’t move away and he bends to brush his lips against hers. She holds herself in a stiff vertical line and he’s nearly certain she’s holding her breath.

“You’re nervous,” he says.

“Yeah, well, I’m out of practice. Quit judging me.”

He kisses her again. “I remember kissing you. It wasn’t like this,” he goads.

She lets out a frustrated noise and grabs his collar, yanking him down so that he has to prop his hands on either side of her on the bed. “Shut up,” she warns.

And then she kisses him, and it’s everything he saw in those flashes of memory, every bit as good as he was afraid it would be. It feels comfortable and exciting and scary. She moves slowly, inching her hand from his collar up to ghost over his neck until she’s cupping his jaw. It feels like a first kiss and one of hundreds that came before it at the same time.

She feels nothing like Steve, but it’s the same in all the ways that matter.

He moves his hand to the nape of her neck, cradling her head and gently massaging at her hairline, and she pulls back, groaning.

“Ugh, you suck,” she complains.

“Very selectively,” he counters and she rolls her eyes and leans back, sucking in a deep breath.

“Go away now,” she says without malice. “You can tell Steve you passed muster.”

He stands, moving to turn toward the door.

“Wait,” she says. “Just… wait. I need - ugh. Reassure me or something.”

He tilts his head slightly, watching her pull stray hairs behind her ears and fidget with the end of her braid. “Steve said you were the missing piece. He was right.” He nods, watches as her face relaxes into something closer to a smile, and then he leaves.

Steve is waiting for him outside. He’s abandoned his trashy magazine and any attempt at nonchalance.

“So?” he asks.

“She’s okay,” Bucky says. “Still got that IV, but she’s fine.”

Steve nods. “Okay, and what about the parts I don’t already know?”

Bucky doesn’t answer. Instead, he grips the armrests on Steve’s chair and bends so he can maul his mouth, not letting up until both of them are desperate for air.

“She says to tell you that I pass muster,” he says, still bracketing Steve with his arms. Steve’s face looks bright and open for the first time in months, and Bucky is caught between guilt and relief. “And,” he hedges. “This is me eating my words.”

“Yeah?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Go ahead and say it.”

“I fucking told you so,” he says smugly, playfully knocking Bucky’s arms aside.

Steve gets up, heading toward Darcy’s room, and then turns as he reaches the door.

“You coming?”

“I don’t think - ”

“Shut up and get over here or I’ll kick your ass,” Steve says warmly.

Bucky follows orders, grumbling the entire way. “Like you _could_ ,” he mutters.

**x**

Watching Steve kiss Darcy should feel wrong. He should feel jealous, and a small part of him does, but he can’t tell who he’s feeling jealous of, which is unexpected. He wants to be kissing Steve (he always wants to be kissing Steve), but Steve gets to touch Darcy’s hair right now. Bucky thinks a lot about Darcy’s hair.

A bigger part just wants both of them to be kissing _him_ , which is also unexpected. It occurs to him that they probably want that, too. If they don’t, the past few months have been hell for no reason.

The kiss only lasts for a few seconds, and Bucky gets a small smug thrill from knowing he got to kiss Darcy longer. It takes him a moment to realize that if he doesn’t fuck this up, he can kiss Darcy whenever he wants to.

He grins, allowing that smug feeling to ease the panic of every other realization - he’ll have to share Steve, Darcy has a tendency to risk her own life and no biochemical enhancements to keep her alive, fucking Hydra will never get off his back and they know exactly who Darcy is. And all three of them live in a lightning rod for danger masquerading as a skyscraper.

At this moment, though, he’s preoccupied with the certainty that at some point in the very near future, he’s going to kiss Darcy again. And Steve. And Steve and Darcy.

He collapses into a chair, watching them talk to each other. They don’t say much, and Darcy deflects all of Steve’s nagging, but it’s comfortable. Familiar. At intervals Steve leans over to kiss Darcy’s temple or smooth her hair back. She complains about the IV, refers to herself disparagingly as a fainting Southern Belle, and warns Bucky that Barton might be suing him for copyright infringement now that he’s taken to crawling above the ceiling.

He decides, while he’s sitting quietly and they’re talking and touching and joking half heartedly about attempts on their lives, that Darcy is going to stay at their apartment tonight, and he’s going to kiss her.

x

The negotiations are stilted and uncomfortable. Who sleeps where and is it okay for them to share a bed again and do they pretend everything’s the same - it’s all very strange. Darcy still has bedclothes at their place, and she changes in the bedroom while he and Steve wait outside. He knows this isn’t their routine. He can imagine what it was like - getting ready for bed together, being so comfortable with each other that it was commonplace. Banal even. He doubts it could ever be boring, but he knows there must have been nights when the sight of her removing her clothes wouldn’t be sexual - just comfortable. Intimate.

On this night, even the thought of her behind the closed door, in the room where he and Steve had woken up together that morning, makes his pulse jump.

Steve grins at him across the kitchen island.

“Distracted?” he asks.

Bucky ignores the jibe. “You happy?”

“Yeah. You?”

He considers, takes stock. “It doesn’t make you jealous. Me wanting her.”

Steve shrugs. “Not even a little. You feeling jealous?”

“Can’t tell yet,” he says honestly. “Too busy thinking about what’s going on in the bedroom right now.” There’s a lull before Bucky asks, “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

Steve sighs. “Probably not. Maybe.”

Bucky nods. “Yeah. Sounds familiar.”

Darcy walks out then, pull her hair out from beneath the collar of her oversized shirt.

“Hey,” she says cautiously. “So, I can sleep on the couch…”

“No,” Bucky says, surprising himself with his earnestness. “Unless you don’t want - ”

She lets out a soft laugh. “No, I want. Steve?”

Bucky watches as Steve walks to her, touching his forehead to hers and saying something lowly. Darcy rolls her eyes and kisses his cheek, and then she looks to Bucky.

“So there are a few ways this can go,” she offers. “We can just go to sleep with a Steve buffer between us, you know, ease into things; we can cuddle a bit and _then_ go to sleep; or we can make out like teenagers and I’ll let you take my shirt off.” She waggles her eyebrows at the last one, smiling broadly at him, and his eyes go wide.

Steve chokes out a laugh. “You’ll give him an aneurysm,” he warns Darcy, pinching her side. Bucky looks at them, considering.

“How about we start with the making out,” he says, taking a step toward them. “And we’ll see where that goes?”

Darcy’s grin goes wider. “Wow, I was kind of joking, but that’s a really good plan.” She nods, still grinning, and without another word walks to the bedroom, leaving the door open. “You guys coming?” she calls.

Steve shoots a look at Bucky. “Well?”

Bucky steps past him, looking over his shoulder with raised eyebrows. “I’m gonna go make out with your girl. You gonna join me?”

“ _Our_ girl,” Steve corrects, following him into the bedroom, where Darcy has planted herself in the middle of the bed. Steve curls around Darcy’s back, his legs splayed out to frame her hips and his chin resting on her shoulder. It’s a damn pretty picture, and Bucky almost wants to stay there for a minute, just looking. It seems too easy, too much, too  _good_.

He gets up on the bed, half crawling toward them until he can rub his nose against Darcy’s.

“Hi,” she says softly. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he leans in, pressing her back against Steve and framing her face with his hands. The first kiss is soft, slow. _Sweet_. When he breaks it, Steve is right there, pulling him in to bite at his lips and soothe them with long kisses. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that Darcy and Steve already know the rhythm - he just needs to go along with it. She kisses his jawline while Steve traces his teeth with his tongue, and just as soon as Steve pulls back, Darcy’s there to pull him back in. The contrast between the comfortable familiarity of Steve and the newness of Darcy is overwhelming in the best way imaginable.

He feels Steve’s hands between them and looks down to see him lightly cupping her breasts. Darcy leans back against Steve’s shoulder and drags in a shaky breath. Bucky swallows.

“Jesus, Stevie.”

He leans back in, caught between kissing Steve or kissing Darcy. Or watching them kiss each other. Steve’s hands drift down to her stomach and Darcy lifts her head.

“Bucky?”

He shakes his head. “You’re so beautiful.”

She grins, biting at the corner of her lip. Steve drops his chin to her shoulder again, staring straight at Bucky.

“C’mere,” he says, grabbing Bucky’s arm and pulling all of them back so they’re collapsed against the pillows with Darcy pressed between them. He leans over Darcy to brush his lips against Bucky’s and pulls away grinning.

Darcy hums, rubbing at her face. “Guys? I think… I should probably go to sleep now.”

Steve frowns. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think all the adrenaline’s finally worn off,” she says with a yawn. “If I stay awake I’ll just start freaking out.” Because of the gun pointed at her head, and the dead body in her lab, Bucky reasons, wanting to kick himself for not remembering that this isn’t her life. This isn’t her normal.

“Go to sleep,” Steve soothes.

She closes her eyes, holding tightly to Bucky’s arm. “You’ll still be here, right?”

“I’m not leaving,” he promises quietly.

**x**

She never volunteers any information about what she calls “the lost year.” He can’t tell if she’s protecting herself or him, or if she just doesn’t want to interfere with his memories coming back naturally, but at least she never refuses to answer questions. He has to ask, and he learns to be specific. “How did get together,” is answered with “Steve and alcohol” until he rephrases it to get the answers he wants.

She sighs and turns her head to look at him. He’s learning that she squints when she’s trying to think of something to say, but that might also have something to do with their position on the roof of the tower and the dim lighting.

“We were all friends. Sort of. Not really,” she amends, looking back up at the sky. “We were friends, but I had these super inappropriate feelings for both of you and I tried to not have those feelings, but obviously,” she waves her hand to gesture between them, “that didn’t work. And then at one of Stark’s charity things, you guys stole a few bottles of champagne and we hid out in one of the back rooms, and at some point Steve just kissed me. I was freaking out because you were _right there_ , but then you kissed me and it turned out Steve had concocted this whole plan to get me into bed. And I’m just going to admit right here that it’s really hard to refuse sex when you guys are wearing tuxedos, okay?”

Bucky snorts, knocking her knee with his until she continues.

“So. PG version, there was…” She smirks. “Carnal activity? And I freaked out because threesomes are great and all, but generally, not that you _ever_ need to absorb this information because you’re never having sex with anyone else ever again, the third party should be like, a stranger, or some distant friend of a friend that you never have to see again. That way there’s no jealousy, no awkward meetings at the water cooler, and everyone can go about their lives.”

“And why do you know this?” he asks with a frown.

“Because I watch a lot of television, Bucky. Now shut up.” She pauses. “Where was I?”

“You were freaking out,” he adds helpfully, lifting her hand to examine her palm. She has a jagged scar crossing her life lines, like she caught the wrong side of a knife.

“Yeah,” she continues. “I was freaking out. And then you showed up while I was at work and asked me out to dinner, which did _not_ help, by the way. I know you can’t remember it, but it was really a bonehead move.”

“Apologies,” he says dryly. He traces the scar and wonders how he never noticed it before.

“Yeah, well, I said no. Because you had a _boyfriend_ , you cheating scumbag. And then Steve cornered me and told me you weren’t a cheating scumbag, you’re just a bonehead, and there was this whole big boring conversation about what we all wanted, and it turned out that I wasn’t alone in the inappropriate feelings, so I just… stopped being friends with you and started being something else.”

Bucky rolls to his side, propping himself up on one arm so he can look at her more fully.

“What,” she says, a guarded look in her eye.

“I’m going to kiss you, so just stop talking for a second, okay?”

A slow smiles spreads on her face. “You like me,” she taunts.

“What did I say about talking?”

“You’re the one who wanted storytime,” she argues. He drops a kiss on her cheekbone, ignoring her. “That’s not going to work if you really want to shut me up,” she continues.

He sighs before kissing the corner of her mouth and then taking her bottom lip between his, worrying it gently with his teeth. She lets out a muffled laugh, tugging his shoulder so that he rolls on top of her.

He watches as her face falls slowly, her wide grin dissipating as she stares at his face.

“What is it?”

“You just - ” She stops herself. “It’s you, but it’s not you. I mean, you’re always _you_ , but I keep forgetting… Don’t worry about it, I’m being stupid.”

He breathes out slowly and sits up. “It’s not stupid.”

She sits up next to him, wrapping her arms around her knees and setting her cheek on her forearms to look at him. “I want you, no matter what you remember, you know? It’s just sometimes when you look at me, I forget. I want to make stupid jokes about stuff and you’ll think I’m crazy because they don’t make sense unless you know about the time we nearly got caught up here and I hid over there - ” she points behind the entrance “ - and you were out here, _naked_ , and you told the security guard that you were doing some ancient form of martial arts training.”

Bucky can’t hold back his laughter, and he ends up falling onto his back, his hands over his eyes.

“Seriously?” he manages, spreading his fingers to look at her.

“Seriously. It was very knight in shining armor. You were protecting my dignity,” she says between huffs of laughter.

“What did the guy say?”

“I think he was too busy being terrified of the naked assassin to say anything. You described his face as simultaneously horrified and intrigued.” She’s nearly crying with laughter now, he can hear her struggling for breath.

“Really?” He lifts his head from the ground to look at her. “Was he cute?”

She slaps his shoulder. “Shut up. Like anyone anyone with half a brain would cheat on Steve.”

“Hmm,” he agrees, dropping his head back. “Or you,” he adds.

“Shut up,” she repeats.

He reaches a hand up, dragging her down to lie next to him again.

“I’m sorry I made you think you weren’t important,” he says quietly.

She puts her head on his shoulder, wrapping an arm around his chest. “Wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry you got your brain scrubbed because of me.”

“That _definitely_ wasn’t your fault. And I got to kill seven Hydra fucks because of it. It came up even.”

“No, it didn’t,” she says.

“No,” he agrees. “It didn’t.” He wraps his arm around her shoulder, pulling her in closer to his chest, and presses a kiss to her head. “But I get to kiss you whenever I want now. That’s good.” He says it with a light tone, but even as he says it, it starts to feel like it is worth it. It’s harder to feel bitter when she’s pressed against him, and not actively in harm’s way. He considers calling Steve just so that he’d have everything secure in one spot, but he doesn’t want to move. And Steve would probably just tell them to quit hiding and come downstairs already.

“Yeah, I like that too.” She squeezes his ribs tighter with her arms briefly. After a few minutes of comfortable silence, she says, “So do you think Stark’s given up looking for us by now?”

“Definitely not,” he deadpans. “We might have to camp out up here.”

She hums. “We probably shouldn’t have spray painted DUM-E.”

“He shouldn’t have been such an ass. Besides, I think DUM-E likes being star spangled.”

She snorts into his shoulder and he allows himself a snicker.

He jolts when he hears the elevator, halfway to pushing Darcy behind him when the doors open and Steve walks out.

“Hey troublemakers,” he calls.

Darcy laughs behind him. “I thought you were gonna get another chance with that security guard,” she whispers into his ear.

Steve sits next to them, eyeing the mats they stole from the gym.

“These are disgusting, you know that right?”

Darcy hums. “These just got cleaned.” She pauses. “I think. Whatever.”

They sit in silence and Bucky looks between them.

“So this is it?”

“What?” Darcy asks.

“We just… get to be happy now.”

Steve scoffs. “Don’t jinx it.”

“Don’t worry,” Darcy adds. “I’m sure it’ll all get fucked up again tomorrow. For right now, though…” She shrugs. “Sex?”

Steve nods. “Solid plan.”

Bucky rolls his eyes before stripping his shirt over his head, tossing it to the side. “You guys are so _needy_.”

**x**

He stays awake after Steve and Darcy have both fallen asleep, curled up in each other in the center of their bed. For once, it’s not the nightmares or headaches or phantom pain. He watches them, burning the image into his mind and holding onto it as tightly as he can.

He wraps his arm around her waist, breathing in the citrus scent of her hair and the spice of Steve’s cologne on the pillow. He thinks maybe this could be it, just like this. This is the whole picture.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and giving feedback on this story. It's been so enjoyable writing (and actually completing) a multi-chapter fic and hearing all your thoughts as it was in progress. I don't think I'd necessarily write a sequel to this, but I'm considering exploring the "lost year" a little more, since there was some backstory that didn't really find a place in this. Once again: thank you so much, I've been so surprised at the positive feedback. It really does mean a lot.


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